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Dated: July 21th, 2020.
Your Excellency,
Muhammadu Buhari,
President & Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces,
Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Dear Mr. President,
Your Excellency, “PLEASE, SAVE OUR LIVES”
“Every man will be remembered for two things, the problem you solve or the one you created”. Your Excellency, we the leaders, elders and members of the aforementioned apex pan socio-cultural group in the South-South Nigeria are constrained to write to you this open letter. It is our collective belief that the contents of this letter will not be treated with levity as it was the case of other similar open letters from the region. Your Excellency, we hereby humbly bring to the notice of your highly esteemed office the recurring complaints which now threatens the subsisting and relative peace, stability and unity amongst the various ethnic groups in the Niger Delta and South-South in particular.
Your Excellency, take notice that the past few months have been characterized by some level of unrest and public outcry across the various ethnic groups, villagers, farmers and fishermen in the South-South arising from the nefarious activities of the herdsmen which calls for the concern of all well meaning sons and daughters from the region. Mr. President, to the best of our knowledge, we are very much aware that your office is not ignorant of this rapacious activities of these hoodlums ravaging the South-South region causing unnecessary tension and pandemonium amongst our people. Your Excellency, it is therefore in the light of this security threat on the lives and properties of the peace loving people of South-South that informed our goodwill open letter to you as a call to “salvage our lives”. Mr. President Sir, it is our proverb in the South-South that “If you lose an hour in the morning, you will spend the rest of the day looking for it”. This is also interpreted to connote that if we lose one soul in the South-South, we will spend the rest of our lives looking for the soul without getting it back. This is why the safety of our people is a desideratum.
Ip-so-facto, we are by this letter urging you and your good office to take a proactive action over the plight of the people of South-South as presented by the voice of the South-South without any further procrastination.
ISSUES FOR CONSIDERATION:
THE ISSUE OF INSECURITY: As earlier mentioned, it is no more a clandestine that the nefarious and deadly activities of the hoodlums called herdsmen has constituted a very serious mayhem and security threat across the six (6) states of the South-South in recent times to the extent of the killings, kidnappings, forceful invasion of our forests, rural communities, towns and villages including our fishing settlements in addendum to the everyday raping of our vulnerable mothers and innocent young girls amongst others. In view of this unfriendly attitude of the herdsmen in our region, we are peacefully appealing to your good office as a father to all as you rightly said during your inauguration speech on May 29th, 2015 to save the people and the land of South-South from herdsmen daily attack, if truly we are part of Nigeria.
Your Excellency, we shall at this point refer you to one of your statements on the day of your first inauguration as a civilian President which you said “I BELONG TO EVERYONE AND BELONG TO NO ONE”.
Your Excellency, if this is truly your word, please prove it and the time is now.
Still on the issue of insecurity, your Excellency, we want to bring to your notice that the South-South people are predominantly farmers and fishermen as their traditional and ancestral occupation and you can’t take them out of it. It is therefore pertinent to note that the threat being posed by the presence and activities of the herdsmen in their various towns and villages including their fishing settlements has unleashed untold hardship on the people thereby exposing them to abject poverty, strange sickness and diseases, hence their only means of livelihood has been cut off from them, since they can no more go to their farms. This is why we are calling on you to do something now that it is more symptomatic before something worse than this will happen to us. God forbid bad thing.
THE ISSUE OF THE INFLUX OF THE ALMAGIRIS: Your Excellency, may we also use this medium to properly inform you that in the past few months under the federal and state government total and partial lockdown across Nigeria; that the South-South region has experienced an unprecedented influx of the Almagiris in their thousands hiding under cows in some of the trucks coming into the South-South from the north eve under the federal government curfew when everyone is supposed to be at his own place; a situation that many security experts considered to be of a serious danger and threat to the peace and security of our people. Interestingly, our concern is that, what could be the mission of these Almagiris at a critical time like this when the Covid-19 pandemic is ravaging the whole country? Your Excellency, as we speak, every individual and collective efforts channeled to stop the menace of the influx of these Almagiris pretending to be herdsmen still remains counterproductive as we keep seeing them in their numbers everyday like pests across our region.
Sequel to this, we hereby appeal to your good office to urgently expedite action in not just addressing but also stopping the activities of the unwanted guests in our land. “A stitch in time saves nine”.
THE ISSUE OF THE CONTROVERSIAL RUGA SETTLEMENT: Your Excellency, it is excruciating to note that ever since the policies of RUGA settlement was proposed and introduced by the federal government that the number of herdsmen in our land is increasing in a geometric progression, therefore generating panic and the fear of the unknown among our people. In view of this, we want to state categorically without any equivocation that the recent domination and influx of the herdsmen in our land is unacceptable to us and therefore in a very clear term, “We don’t want them if the government will not call them to order to stop feeding their cows with our farm crops and also stop the harassment and invasion of our forests”. Arguably, we consider the harassment and invasion of South-South by the herdsmen as a calculated policy configured by the federal government to forcefully take our lands and render us homeless, jobless and debilitated using the herdsmen as the instrumentality.
QUESTIONS WAITING FOR ANSWERS:
How much is the herdsmen cows generating to the national GDP of Nigeria?
When did cow become a federal government investment in Nigeria?
How can the government expect us to freely donate our ancestral land to the herdsmen for their own private cow business without recourse to our fishing and farming businesses?
Why can’t the same government also donate the desert in the north to the fishermen for their fishing business as to balance the equation?
Why can’t the government sand-fill the Atlantic Ocean for the herdsmen’s cow businesses?
Why can’t the federal government donate free land to the private estate developers if the federal government RUGA policy is for the interest of all Nigerian private businessmen? Etc.
Again, in as much as we are not against the herdsmen and any individual or group of persons doing or intending to do any legitimate business in the South-South, we are not also ready to tolerate any act of gross misconduct and incivility capable of truncating and deflecting the balloon of our collective social existence as a people. Therefore, we are also using this open letter to call on the President of Nigeria to use his good office to urgently address this issue of insecurity in our land, except there is a strong conspiracy somewhere to exterminate the people of South-South.
THE ISSUE OF THE FIGHT AGAINST THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: We cannot expurgate or undermine the resilient, doggedness and spirited efforts of the federal government in the fight against the pandemic, but our concern is that if the federal government under the watch of Mr. President has put or channeled the same or even half of the effort they used in fighting the Covid-19 to tackle the various security threats to our national unity, insecurity would have been a thing of the past and Mr. President would have also written his name with a golden pen in the Guinness book of Nigeria’s best President of our time.
However, we are still very optimistic that the President can still rise to the occasion to redeem and defend his public image as a man of integrity by putting every machineries in place to protect the lives, land and people of South-South whom he swore an oath to defend and protect on the day of his inauguration as part of his social contract and responsibility to all Nigerians.
Finally, your Excellency, if after this passionate appeal to save the lives of our people, nothing is being done, we will be forced to exhume the graves of our founding fathers to ask them how we became part of one Nigeria and how they came about the name South-South for us. However, unlike other razzmatazzing organizations, we don’t easily come out to talk because we don’t believe in noise-making. However, we have implicit confidence in the ability and the capacity of Mr. President to do the needful and the time is Now.
Once again, thank you Mr. President for finding time to read and also act on our letter.
Sincerely,
Chief Dick K.L Harry
President General
Mangrove People Leadership Initiative (MAPLI)
Rt. (Hon.) Chief Mfawa Ofegobi
Secretary General
Mangrove People Leadership Initiative (MAPLI)
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